Chapter 33 31

□□□ Honorable audience, illusion has always gone hand in hand with technology. Clockworks, magnets, and gunpowder were inventions that were only just becoming known to magicians who were already applying them to the stage.Sometimes, they are even faster than scientists.Before Edison invented the incandescent light bulb, the great illusionist Rob.Woody has already used electric light as the content of the performance. Not long after guns were invented, illusionists put pistols on stage.The most famous, and most horrific, scene involves an assistant shooting a gun at a performer, who the illusionist catches with his hand or mouth.

This kind of drama is quite common in European circuses, and various programs with different contents are designed, including using several guns at the same time, or inviting the audience to go on stage and shoot at the performers themselves. Now, in our next program, we will recreate the world-famous illusionist William.Esworth.Robinson's performance.He claimed to be Chinese, and his stage name was Cheng Liansu. Shooting a living person was the finale of his show, and his reputation soared to the sky because of it. There are many ways to fool the audience into believing the trick is real, and some daring performers will use real guns and ammunition, and only replace them with powdered blanks after they have been inspected by the audience.American magicians in the 1800s also used real guns, but the bullets were dry dirt coated with silver paint.Robinson's method is to use a designed muzzle gun, which has two barrels. The upper barrel contains real bullets, but it cannot be fired; blank bombs.

Ah, respectable audience, I seem to see worried expressions on your faces?Are you wondering how I uncovered the secret of the trick beforehand, and how I broke Robinson's illusion so easily. In this way, what exciting show is there to watch? Where is there any mystery? Please be safe and calm.On March 23, 1918, at the finale of Robinson's show, his assistant pointed two rifles at him simultaneously and shot him.The gunshot rang out, but the illusionist fell on the stage holding his chest, and died not long after.It was afterwards learned that powder from one of the rifles had leaked into the barrel containing the real cartridge, and had ignited after the blank cartridge had been fired, sending the real cartridge into the wretch's chest.

Look, venerable audience, this is the most exciting part of our line of work. Even us illusionists never know how a show will end. □□□ In the Lan Hang Anse Hotel on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Moorlake walks down the fifteenth-floor corridor in the uniform of a hotel bellboy.He carried a large room service tray with a plate covered with a round metal lid and a vase with a red tulip in it.Everything about him fits perfectly with the environment here.Moorlake himself had the habitually obedient look of a cheerful waiter.Coupled with his wandering eyes, faint smile, unobtrusive steps and clean and flawless tray, his presence cannot arouse any suspicion.

There is only one thing about him that differs from the rest of Lanhanganse's waiters: instead of an English breakfast or a club sandwich, under the round metal lid on the tray, there's a handful of shellfish loaded and suppressed. Rita automatic pistol, and a lockpicking tool pouch and other tools. Did you enjoy your stay?He asked a couple walking towards him. Yes, they replied, wishing him a nice afternoon. In the hallway he met a few more lodgers who had either returned from their Sunday lunch or were about to go out to enjoy the beautiful spring afternoon.He nodded and smiled at them all.

He passed a window from which he could look out on a large expanse of green space that was part of Central Park.He wondered what kind of commotion would arise in the tent of the Fantastic Circus at this time. It took him days and days of painstaking efforts to leave clues at the murder scene before he led the police to that place. Or rather, misled them there. Misdirection and sleight of hand are the keys to successful illusions, and no one can do it better than Moorek, with his many faces, who can appear like a match sparkle and vanish like a candle flame. He is a man who can make himself completely disappear.

The police must be inexplicably terrified at this time, which is conceivable. They believe that the bomb may detonate at any time, and they are desperately looking for it.There were no bombs, however, and there was no danger to the two thousand spectators at the Fantastic Circus (except that some might jostle and stampede each other to death in a panic, if anything). Walking to the bottom of the corridor, Morek looked back and found that he was alone in the corridor now.Immediately he placed the tray on the floor next to a guest room door, lifted the lid, and took the black pistol and stuffed it into the zipped pocket of the waiter's uniform.Then he opened the tool bag, picked out a screwdriver, and put the whole tool bag in his pocket.With quick movements, he removed the metal protective sheet installed on the window, which could only be opened a few inches, (he thought to himself, only human beings would commit suicide if they had the opportunity, otherwise, why install this kind of protection on the window? Something?) Push the window all the way out.He carefully inserted the screwdriver back into the tool bag, closed the zipper, jumped up the window with both hands, and stood outside on the catwalk.He walked carefully on this narrow catwalk that was forty-five meters above the ground.

The width of the catwalk is fifty centimeters. This is the number he got from measuring the catwalk in the room when he stayed in this hotel a few days ago. A person's sense of balance.He walked on the catwalk made of limestone, as smoothly as a sidewalk.After advancing five meters, he reached the corner of the hotel building.Here he stopped and looked at the building next to the Lanhang Anse Hotel. The building faced East Seventy-fifth Street, and there were no catwalks outside the building, but there was a fire escape, and below where he was standing was a ventilation shaft, filled with never-ending blasts of air-conditioning. meter.Moorlake threw a small grapple onto the rusted iron escape exit of the building opposite, then tied the rope around his waist, taking in any slack.Then he crouched and leaped across the bottomless space between the two buildings.This jump was so far that he didn't need the help of the rope at all, and he landed on the fire escape exit, so steady that he didn't even need to reach out his hands to hold on to anything.

He untied the rope, climbed two flights of stairs, and stopped outside a window on the seventeenth floor.He took a quick glance inside, and there was no one on the passage in the house.He put the pistol and tools on the window sill, and pulled off his hotel waiter uniform, revealing the gray suit, white shirt and tie he had already worn underneath.With the gun in his belt, he unlocked the window with a tool, and leaped into the house. Moorek stood still, breathing evenly, and then walked along the passage to the house he locked.He stood in front of the gate, squatted down, and used the tool to unlock the door again.In less than three seconds he had unlocked the lock; in less than five seconds he had drawn the deadbolt.He pushed the door in slightly, leaving just enough room for the hinges to show.He took out a spray can of lube and sprayed the hinges a few times so that the door wouldn't make any noise when it was pushed open.After a while, Moorek had entered the long and dark hallway inside the house, and then he quietly closed the door.

He looked around in the hallway for direction. On the wall of the entrance hall are several large reproductions of Dali's surreal landscape paintings and several photos of family members.Prominent on the wall is a clumsy watercolor of a New York City scene by a child, signed Chrissy.Beside the door stood a cheap table, the shorter one resting on a stack of square-folded yellow standard blotter paper.A pair of snowshoes was leaning against the corner of the entrance all alone, the leather boot fixings on them had been broken.The wallpaper on the walls is old and stained everywhere. Morek followed the sound of the TV from the living room and walked along the passage.But he took a brief detour and stepped into a small, dark room containing a sooty Kawai baby grand piano.There was a sheet of music open on the piano, the margins filled with note points.That Chris's name appeared here again, on the cover of this music book.Moorek didn't know much about music, but he looked through the score and found that the difficulty of this piano textbook seemed to be quite high.

He judged the girl to be a poor painter, but an excellent young musician. The name was Chrissy.Grady's girl is none other than New York City Assistant Attorney Charles.Grady's daughter. This is the prosecutor's home. After accepting one hundred thousand dollars offered by someone, Moore was hired to kill people here. Emilia.Sachs was sitting on the grass outside the fantasy circus tent, his face wrinkled by the pain from the right side of his waist.After helping dozens of people get out of the tent without being jostled, she finally found this place to catch her breath. The masked Alecchino was still on the great black and white banner overlooking her from above, still crackling loudly with the wind.After the panic about him in the tent, he looked weirder than yesterday, more grotesque, more repulsive. She escaped the crisis of being trampled to death. She didn't fall down just now. The knee and boot that slammed into her face turned out to be from a person who climbed on top of the crowd in panic and stepped on their heads and shoulders. The man who escaped from the exit.Even so, at this moment she still felt a throbbing pain in her back, chest and face.She sat there for about fifteen minutes, still feeling dizzy and nauseous, partly from the jostling and partly from the claustrophobic space of that horror.She could tolerate a small space, even a space like an elevator, but being completely trapped and unable to move like before was still the most terrifying torture for her. A number of injured people near her have been treated, but no one was seriously injured.The leader of the emergency medical team told her that most of these people had sprains or cuts on objects, a few people had dislocations, and only one person had a broken arm. Sachs and the audience near her escaped from the exit on the south side of the tent.As soon as she left the tent, she knelt down on the grass and crawled away from those people.Once out of the closed environment where a bomb might be hidden or an armed terrorist might be, the viewers become good Samaritans eager to help those who are feeling dizzy or injured. Lying on the green grass, she gestured to stop a member of the bomb squad, flashed her badge, and told him that there was an object covered with a tarp under the stands near the south exit of the tent.The explosion-proof personnel immediately notified his colleagues and entered the tent to check. At this time, the military music in the tent stopped, Edward.Kadesky walked up the mountain from the tent. It was not until the members of the anti-explosion team appeared that some spectators realized what kind of danger they were facing just now. Thanks to Kadesky's quick wit, they were saved from the most terrifying panic.Many spectators clapped enthusiastically when they saw Kadeschi, but he only nodded modestly in response, only wanting to quickly check the safety of the circus members and audience.Still, there were others who were unkind to him (wounded and unscathed); they glared at him, demanded to know what had happened, and complained that he should have handled the evacuation better. The bomb squad and a dozen firefighters scoured the Enchanted Faire tent without finding any bomb devices.Inside the tarp-covered box were just boxes of toilet paper.A search operation that stretched from inside the tent to the trailer and supply truck outside turned up nothing. This result made Sachs frown.Did they get it wrong?how can that be possible?She was puzzled.The evidence is clearly there, it couldn't be clearer.Rhyme always made bold conclusions based on the evidence, and although he occasionally made mistakes, in this case of the sorcerer, all the evidence came together to point to the Fantastic Circus, which was definitely the last target of the gangsters. Did Rhyme get the news that they hadn't found the bomb?She thought, standing up staggeringly, trying to find a colleague to borrow a radio from him; her own Motorola radio, which was lying in pieces next to the south exit of the tent, had obviously been the cause of this panic. The only victim in the crowding incident. Morelake quietly left Charles.In the small piano room where Grady lived, he walked into the dark passage, stopped for a moment, and listened to the sounds coming from the living room and kitchen. He wondered how dangerous the situation before him could be. He had choreographed a number of maneuvers to dissuade Grady's bodyguards so they wouldn't shoot him the first time they were startled.At that lunch at the Bedford Station restaurant two weeks ago, Morelake and Jedy Jerry, from upstate New York,Barnes met with other National Guard members.He came up with a plan, thinking that the day before he broke into Grady's house, it would be best to have someone assassinate the prosecutor.It was unanimously decided that the most suitable candidate for the wretched man was a slightly deviant priest at Kendon Falls: Ralph.Swenson (Barnes has some influence on him, but still can't believe him completely. So, yesterday, after Moore Lake escaped from the Harlem Riverside, he changed into a workman's prop costume and followed him from the priest's cheap hotel all the way to the community school to make sure the bad guy didn't back down at the last minute). According to Moorlake's theory that Swenson failed on purpose (the firing pin on the gun provided by Barnes was simply broken), Grady's bodyguards must be psychologically depressed after they catch an assassin. A lot of determination to use force, so when they meet the second assassin, they will not react too quickly. But it's all just theory, he thought. He passed more crappy art, more photographs of family members, stacks of outdated Law Journals, Vogue, and The New Yorker, and piles of dirty trash from street fairs. Xi Xi's antique Grady bought it with the intention of giving it a good job of restoring it, but the fact that it keeps piling up here only proves that he has never had the time. Morek knew where to go in this room; he had been here not long ago, posing as a maintenance worker.But that was just a basic reconnaissance. The purpose was to figure out the floor plan of the house and study the routes of entry and exit. There was no time to pay more attention to the life aspects of this family.He noticed the professional credentials of Grady and his wife, who was also a lawyer, on the wall.There are still many photos of relatives on the wall, but the most numerous is the nine-year-old blonde girl. Moorlake recalled meeting Barnes and his accomplices at the riverside restaurant.At that time, they went off topic to discuss whether there was any reason to kill Grady's wife and daughter together.According to Moorlake's plan, it made sense for Swensen to sacrifice, but what he couldn't figure out was why he wanted to kill Glady's family?So he posed the question to Barnes and the others as they ate their delicious roast turkey. Well Mr. Will, Jedi.Barnes had this to Moreke: That's a good question.All I can say is that you should kill their whole family for no particular reason. Moorek nodded, a thoughtful expression on his face; he knew that blind submission to the audience or fellow performers on stage must never be allowed.Well, I don't mind killing them, he said: But unless they're dangerous, say they can testify against me, or the girl suddenly wants to pick up the phone and call the police, wouldn't it make more sense to keep them alive?Perhaps some of you will object to the killing of women and children. Well, since you think so, Mr. Will, although they seem a little dissatisfied with this tempered approach, Barnes said it anyway: We support your idea. Now, Moorlake stopped outside Grady's living room and took out a fake NYPD badge to hang on his chest.He glanced at a dirty mirror whose surface needed a good wipe down. Well, he's in the role, and looks like the cop who's here to protect the death-threatened prosecutor. take a deep breath.do not worry. □□□ Now, esteemed audience, the lights have gone on and the curtain has been drawn. The real show is about to begin □□□ With his hands hanging naturally at his waist, Morek walked around the corner of the corridor and strode into the living room.